Warning: Please note that the acpid daemon also handles the "power button" and "hibernate button" events. Running both systems at the same time may lead to unexpected behaviour.

Prevent suspend when closing the lid

Some laptops may experience behaviour where the laptop suspends when the lid is closed despite having set the options Laptop lid close action on battery and Laptop lid close action on AC to blank. If this is the case uncomment the HandleLidSwitch line in the /etc/systemd/logind.conf file and change the value to ignore. The value is set to suspend by default.

GDM keyboard layout

To change the keyboard layout for all graphical programs (including GDM), add the following line to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.conf, replacing fr with the appropriate keymap.

GDM 2.x layout

Change the language

To change the GDM language, edit the file /var/lib/AccountsService/users/gdm and change the language line using the correct UTF-8 value for your language. You should see something similar to the text below:

/var/lib/AccountsService/users/gdm

[User]
Language=fr_FR.UTF-8
XSession=
SystemAccount=true

Now just reboot your computer.

Once you have rebooted, if you look at the /var/lib/AccountsService/users/gdm file again, you will see that the language line is cleared — do not worry, the language change has been preserved.

Automatic login

To enable automatic login with GDM, add the following to /etc/gdm/custom.conf (replace username with your own):

gdm3setup

You can install the gdm3setupAUR tool from the AUR to configure GDM. It will allow you to change a few settings, such as the theme, the automatic connection, or the date format.

GDM legacy

If you want to fall back to the old GDM, which also has a tool for configuring its settings, install gdm-oldAUR from the AUR.

Troubleshooting

GDM fails to unlock

Be sure to set the correct icon/gtk-theme. You can use gdm3setupAUR from the AUR to check the current theme settings.

GDM fails on logout

If GDM starts up properly on boot, but fails after repeated attempts on logout, try adding this line to the daemon section of /etc/gdm/custom.conf:

GdmXserverTimeout=60

gconf-sanity-check-2 exited with status 256

If GDM pops up an error about gconf-sanity-check-2, you may check permissions in /home and /etc/gconf/gconf.xml.system (the latter should be 755).
If GDM is still printing the message, try to empty the gdm home. Run as root:

rm -rf /var/lib/gdm/.*

If that doesn't help, try to set /tmp owner and permissions to:

# chown -R root:root /tmp
# chmod 777 /tmp

GDM will not load after attempting to set up automatic log-in

To solve this issue, edit /etc/gdm/custom.conf from a TTY and comment out the AutomaticLoginEnable and AutomaticLogin lines.